When America's First "Flying Saucer" Report Established Every Pattern We'd See Again—Including Dead Investigators
Three weeks before Roswell captured headlines, the Maury Island Incident established every element that would define UFO encounters for decades: mysterious craft dropping strange debris, a man in a black suit issuing warnings over breakfast, evidence that vanished, and two Air Force intelligence officers who died investigating what was almost certainly a hoax.
Set against the paranoid summer of 1947—when the CIA didn't yet exist, the Air Force was still part of the Army, and institutional chaos reigned—this forgotten incident reveals how Cold War anxiety transformed even obvious frauds into matters of national security.
Through declassified FBI documents and military records, we trace how harbor patrolman Harold Dahl's fabricated story about donut-shaped aircraft over Puget Sound inadvertently created the template for UFO mythology, complete with the first reported "Man in Black" and a suspicious plane crash that fueled conspiracy theories for generations. The Maury Island Incident proves that in the early Cold War's atmosphere of institutional paranoia, even fictional UFOs could have fatal consequences.
Let’s listen in as Nathaniel Sheppard narrates this tale on my behalf, shall we?
-Daniel P. Douglas
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